I turned and walked across the room and snapped off the light, and then back to the sink, where I began to feel my knees shaking. I bit down hard on my lower lip as I sensed James moving silently, closing the space between us until I could feel his breath on my neck.
With my eyes closed, and holding steady for fear of crumbling to the floor . . .
“Oh God,” I whispered, “I swear I don’t know how to make love.”
“I swear you do,” he said. “We already did it once, so I know you do.”
“That was so long ago, it wasn’t like . . .”
He just answered, “It was to me.”
He pushed his body close behind me and reached around my hips, placing both his hands between my legs. With each hand on the inside he gently pulled my legs apart and grabbed onto my inner thighs as he pushed himself up against my back. I braced my hands against the sink and let my head roll to one side as he began to kiss my neck.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
His fingers were now inching down the zipper on my pants as he carefully and slowly opened the top of my jeans. I put my hands on his as he ventured farther inside, half holding him back, half guiding him along.
“Don’t you dare stop me,” he said into my ear and then licked it.
I arched against his chest. “I’m not, I’m just a little . . .”
“What? You don’t want this?” He wet his finger and slid it down my pants, slowly outlining me.
“This is just . . .” I took a deep breath in. At least he was behind me, and I didn’t have to look him in the eye. “ . . . a little crazy.”
“I’m about to make you a lot crazier.”
Minutes later we were on the floor, and he was on his knees yanking my jeans off. I lay back feeling everything all at once: relief that we were doing this, fear that we were doing this, total excitement that we were doing this. As I listened to his exquisite moans, I knew how much I really wanted this. I’d waited so long since that time in the cold Jeep with the swirling snow illuminated outside by the parking lot lights.
The smell of sex was then weighing heavily in the air around us, with James’s sweat dripping down the sides of his naked body, and the two of us rolling around in a frenzy on my dusty, hard wood, walk-up floor . . .
“ALLIE? YOU THERE?” James’s voice bellowed from the phone in the corner of the Tudor Room. “Did you hear what I said about running into Neal and Charlie?”
“I did. So weird.” I hadn’t focused on one word, I was so lost in that moment years before on my sweat-drenched floor and why I hadn’t taken that path. Fuck. Why hadn’t I taken that path? Why was I so impatient to get married with James off and gone just after we did make love for real? I quickly asked, “Can I come up for a day to sit in the waiting room with you? Would that be helpful?”
“Not right now, especially since Clementine couldn’t come. That just wouldn’t . . .”
Clementine wasn’t with him so I wondered why an old friend couldn’t support an old friend. “James. Why the hell can’t I be there? It’s me talking. I’m just trying to be there for you and . . .” And maybe rekindle something in your hour of need . . .
“No, it’s too much here. I’m so happy to talk to you and focus on how you are. But with my family here, I just want to focus on them, so it will just frustrate me . . . Anyway, Allie, I gotta go. Just checking in.” And he hung up.
ONCE HE SAW me over on the chair behind his podium, Georges the maître d’ threw his arms in the air as if I were the Queen of Sheba. “Oh, Mrs. Crawford, you look divine.” He ran over to me and pulled me up. “Why your husband would keep a woman like you waiting is beyond explanation.” He glanced at his table chart on the lit lectern he presided over. “Let’s see, with this beautiful woman here, that changes things . . .” He tapped his pen on his forehead. It took me a minute to focus as I was reeling a bit from the James call and the choices I made that maybe weren’t the right ones.
“Georges.” I read the table chart upside down. “Changes things how? Are you giving Wade a nicer table because his wife is here or a less important table because he’s not dining with a CEO?”
“Are you kidding? You come here and I arrange the room around you.”
This guy was such a pretentious, disingenuous fool—acting like I was so important when he had enabled Wade’s affair with Jackie, I assumed, among others. At the corner banquette, a B/B+ table, Murray swiveled his head and spotted his prey.
“Allie!” he barked. “I’ve been meaning to call you all morning.”
“What’s up, boss?” I said as I scanned the room. No Tommy.
“Svetlana. You know her.”
I thought about my husband’s hand way too intimately grabbing her hip bone. “Yes, I know Svetlana.”
“Well, there’s a problem,” Murray said.
I thought about my husband’s two teeth flying across my living room.
“You know what, Murray? I sensed there was a problem. Call me a genius but . . .”
“We need to do something with her film; the preopening reviews are just going to kill her and sink her. It makes the festival look lame when such a high-profile model tanks. We need to showcase it a little more.”
“But, Murray, her film sucks. We are all about quality not glitz, remember you saying that?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He didn’t give a hoot that I’d nailed him. “Showcase the girl. Okay? Ask Delsie Arceneaux’s people to do it on CNBB? It’ll make a long list of things move a lot smoother. I promise you. I don’t need Max Rowland breathing fire up my asshole.”
“I think we just witnessed in my living room that that isn’t a safe idea.”
Murray focused his gaze across the room in Delsie’s direction. She was wearing a springtime violet Valentino jacket with a see-through blouse underneath, having an extremely intense conversation with the secretary general of the UN and, from what I could see, about to crawl on the table on all fours.
As I stood up to leave, Murray motioned for me to sit down again. “And do me a favor, between us.”
“What, Murray?”
“Stop asking your husband all those questions about Max Rowland. It’s no good for you. Just stay out of it.”
He whisked me off with a flick of his hand. Well, that was revealing: one more dot to connect. He and Wade were talking about the fact that I was asking difficult questions. I was a party to these jerks getting their way for long enough. With Wade now twenty minutes late, I perused the room and stewed over the fact that the Vulgarians in this place made their cash on the backs of actual workers like me. And with a salary ratio of a million to one. A simmering rage began to work its way up the back of my neck as I walked away from Murray.
Now Max Rowland, at the regular table next to mine, was right back in the thick of questionable activity, lecturing some rapt investors with a little Texas twang. “If y’all consider how energy intensive your businesses are, you should really be hedgin’ more. I have close relationships with people close to the leader of Kazakhstan and I could give you some very confidential information on that pipeline.” Recidivism rates probably aren’t recorded for the likes of Max, but they say it’s common for all criminals to return to a life of crime.
And then . . . stage left, two swans entered where before there was only one. Jackie Malone slinked in behind the bar so no one could see her with an equally statuesque redhead. It was the first time I’d ever seen her with another woman. A couture-decked twentysomething was one thing. But two of them? Since when do mistresses hang out together? Or maybe this new girl was just a friend in town for the week and Jackie brought her by to show off her power haunt? And yet . . . it was rare to see anyone their age at the Tudor Room.
Jackie’s friend was wildly sexual beneath her deceivingly prim outfit. She had straight red hair in a perfect shoulder-length cut, slightly longer in the front. She was wearing a tight, smoky gray linen dress that I guessed was Dolce & Gabbana from the bold silver zipper going down her
back.
Jackie stared right at me, clearly wanting to ask me something. She pointed her finger to the seat next to mine, asking if I was expecting Wade.
I shrugged, indicating I had no idea where he was. Then she motioned for me to meet her down the wine hall. Great. Bump into Tommy with Jackie.
She walked past and winked in my direction as she moved toward the ladies’ room. I followed her, leaving my cardigan on the banquette so Wade would know I’d arrived.
I walked down a long corridor lined with locked glass doors with small spotlights showcasing wines from every major wine region. Dangerous images of Tommy groping me in closets and elevators, groping me down romantic wine hallways, started to make me feel sick. I began running down the hallway to the ladies’ room.
“In here. Hurry!” Jackie whispered.
The upstairs restrooms at the Tudor Room were more like small chic ebony drawing rooms. Every twelve inches, white tulips in crystal vases punctuated a glass shelf that lined the perimeter of the room. A woman, silent, but privy to New York’s greatest secrets, obsessively wiped clean every surface and folded and refolded the stiff linen hand towels stitched with a discreet brown T.R. in the corner.
“We need to talk!” Jackie again whispered loudly from one of the toilets. There were no actual stalls at the Tudor Room, but rather four separate little rooms with shiny black lacquer sinks. The attendant busied herself with slightly more frenzied wiping of already pristine counters.
“We can sit out . . .” I offered.
“Nope. In here. I know why Max punched your husband.” She yanked me into her little room and shut the door. “Max was right. And you were right. Wade doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and he definitely fucked everything up with the media spin on that Novolon stock. They bet everything on that going up. Wade tried to boost the rumors of Novolon’s superior technology by planting some puff piece articles and getting Delsie to sing Novolon’s praises on her business stock show. But then the story just didn’t hold.”
“He can’t control every opinion out there, there must have been naysayers,” I added.
“Yes!” she whispered. “He’s not the Wizard of Oz that he thinks he is. He played his hand too big with these guys and Max bet huge on Novolon going up and it didn’t. Everything I told you is true. Now that you know everything, please recognize we are in this together. That flash drive will be our best proof of their hiding profits and shifting cash overseas. It has the account numbers of where Max Rowland is stashing the money. We will have no way of knowing if it’s Liechtenstein or Switzerland if we don’t have banks and account numbers for their shell companies.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘we’?”
“I mean me.”
“Well, I don’t want to get my husband in trouble; we are still a family. But I do want to know all this; how do I know you won’t do something to hurt him?”
She grabbed the sides of my arms. “They want Murray and Max. I promise you. Wade is a two-bit player. The flash drive will be the linchpin and you’ve got to get it to me.”
“Who is they?”
“Just trust me. Get me the flash drive.”
29
Please Don’t Let This Happen
“So sorry; I got a little caught up.” Wade rushed over to my table. He struggled across to his side of the banquette.
“You’re thirty-five minutes late,” I said, wanting him on the defensive. “Do you keep anyone waiting this long as a regular practice? I hope not.”
He ordered his usual Red Zinger iced tea and checked out the room—his eyes fluttering ever so slightly as they passed the bar area with Jackie and her new friend by her side—before he focused on me. And then he focused on himself. “I’m so sorry. I’ve got to say hello to Maude Pauley.”
Before I knew it, Wade was actually inching out of our booth in order to table-hop and say something oh-so-fascinating to the aging female CEO of a cosmetics behemoth she’d created from a door-to-door business almost fifty years ago. He glad-handed his way past Murray’s booth, whispered something, at which they both laughed heartily.
Was it a show for the room or had they recovered from Max’s shock and awe? More likely, the former. Now every single person in the restaurant seemed to be acting shady, taking down the country and possibly me in the process.
“Now,” Wade said, scooting back into the booth, holding my hand and lowering his voice. “Allie, I’ve been short with you, and I apologize for that, but it all has to do with the same thing.” He clasped his hands carefully for full effect.
“It’s the financials at Meter, Allie,” he said, sighing at my rolling eyes. “We’re on the brink of implosion.” He looked around to see if anyone might be within earshot and dropped his voice even lower while smiling his Wade Crawford signature grin. The effect was creepy.
“The financials are far worse than my projections, and I may have gotten myself in a real shit storm at work over this. There are those who want me out, but I won’t allow that to happen.”
I matched my smile to his, but nothing about this conversation was making me happy. “What are you going to do? And I need to know what this has to do with Max Rowland.”
“He’s part of a longer story. Let me stick with Meter.”
“Wade.” I put my hand on his arm. “An angry Texan who may wear a suit but who just got out of prison is a little more important than your magazine, especially an angry Texan who knocks your teeth out. You can always find another job if they fire you.”
“Find another job? Meter isn’t just a job, Allie; it’s something I created twenty years ago—it’s my entire career. It was nothing before I got my hands on it. But I don’t really expect you to ever understand that I’m, in turn, nothing without it. Nothing.” He looked genuinely pained by the thought. “I’ve already taken steps to ensure that we’ll survive this lingering advertising recession.”
“What steps?” Finally, there was a glimmer of the old Wade, making plans to keep our family safe. I gave him one last shred of a chance to convince me.
“We had to eviscerate the ad rate base, for starters. I can’t even say the figure out loud. Let’s just say it’s less than a Whopper with Cheese.”
“Oh,” I said, and sat back in the booth with my hands folded in my lap. His “we” was different from my “we.”
He squinted at me, as if he was about to tell me that he’d successfully laundered millions of dollars through the Caymans. “I wanted you to hear before the press jumps on it.”
“How thoughtful.” I returned his squint.
“What on God’s earth is wrong with you?” He was livid. “We are in deep shit. This up-and-down economy has me by the balls. It was supposed to smooth out by now, damnit, but instead it’s far worse than I could have projected.” He took a bite of bread and grabbed his left cheek where Max had punched him. Putting a napkin over his mouth, he then mashed his new tooth caps back into place. “Damnit, my smile is forever ruined by that dickhead.” He spoke softer so no one could hear. “And taking Meter online only is not an option. I want to touch and feel the print version. Many of our readers still want those glossy photos in their hands.”
“I know how you feel.” I tried to sound sympathetic. “Our donations are also way down for some of the charities we’re working with pro bono. No one wants to pay for important films that help people when . . .”
“We’re talking about Meter here, not your little film projects.”
“My what?”
“Come on, stop being so sensitive.” He used a napkin to dab at his slightly sweaty brow. “What you are missing is that with Meter I am talking millions and millions of dollars out the window for a major company. All under my watch. They’re going to say I ran this thing into the ground.”
“Is this really the only problem right now? Isn’t there much more to the story?”
“Yes, there is,” he answered. “There is more to the story. But I have a plan, and I need you by my side. If I
can get Meter out from under its corporate ownership and run it independently, I can get past this problem. I may have some outside investors who will buy the thing and let me run it. I just can’t let it get out how far under we are.”
He sat back and gave a little wave to someone across the room as my heart sank right into my knees. I wasn’t just married to a philanderer; I was married to a gambler. “We have to be a united front. If it gets out how bad things are, we’re going to have to do everything we can to contain it. I talked to Max Rowland’s CFO and got some ideas about pushing our costs like printing and postal to a later quarter and advancing our ad revenue to dress up our financial picture. It might get us past the investors’ smell test.”
“And then what, Wade? You get Max’s teams to invest in something absurd and they bust your kneecaps the next time they don’t make the money you promised? Or you promise him you can fix things in the media for his benefit?”
He looked at me like he was trying to decipher how globally I was talking and how much I knew. “You mean, then what what? I’ll still have complete control over the Meter brand.”
“That’s not what I mean. What kind of shady business do you have going on with Max? Whatever you are doing with him is worse than Meter failing. More dangerous, I mean.”
Wade looked up and grinned as Georges approached. “Today we are offering a beautiful piece of Chilean sea bass in a green tomato coulis with caramelized leeks and baby purple fingerlings drizzled with a miso acai glaze.”
Wade tapped his fingers nervously on the table, waiting for Georges’s litany of choices to end while I stared at the small, tight bouquet of white flowers in the silver vase until it got blurry. “We have a lovely roast loin of lamb with mascarpone polenta topped with light strands of frizzled chanterelles and a medley of summer vegetables . . .”
I hated to think just what kind of what stupid idea Wade was about to execute and with whom. I knew he would never admit it to me now, and he’d never even care to explain why Max punched him out. One thing I knew for certain: I no longer could afford to delay my decision making. If he went down, he would certainly take Blake, Lucy, and me with him.
The Idea of Him Page 21